Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent by Nolan Bushnell & Gene Stone

Author:Nolan Bushnell & Gene Stone [Bushnell, Nolan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-07-15T14:00:00+00:00

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A lot of people believe they can game any system—i.e., they can figure out how to get credit for actions that weren’t directly linked to positive outcomes.

Gaming a system is death to a meritocracy because the people who are gaming it destroy all semblance of fairness. And gamers are usually pretty blatant about their gaming, which tends to anger everyone else around them.

In the long run, it’s best to prevent any one person from taking the credit for a new innovation or idea. At Atari, whenever a good idea began to take form on its way to reality, we would try to associate it with as many of the people as possible who helped bring it into the light. This policy created fairness, and fairness works.

Seldom is one concept ever imagined, presented, executed, and realized by a single individual. Very few good ideas coming from one person are even fully formed. Scores of decisions still have to be made, starting with developing the initial idea and culminating in the debut of the product or service. Each of these decisions is made by someone who may well be making an important, if not always highly visible, addition to the original idea.

Furthermore, if the original creator takes too much ownership of his idea, he may well try to exert too much control over it (after all, he says, it’s his, and he thought of it first). Let’s say he’s the one who first thought up the Amazing Widget 450. If given free rein, he may become the arbiter of everything that happens to the Amazing Widget 450: its benefits, improvements, and changes.

Too much clout! No company should ever empower the person who originated the idea with the ability to censor the person making improvements, even if the product is as amazing as the Amazing Widget 450. An excellent product or service is far more likely to be the amalgam of many small improvements and ideas rather than one sudden thunderbolt.

The other problem with the credit game is that if someone is able to take all of it, you’ve created a culture of individual ownership. Why give the next great idea to your team when you can take it out on your own and get all the glory?

A good corporate culture allows the corporation’s identity to meld with the individual employee’s. Apple has created an environment where its retail employees are willing to work for relatively low wages, while creating typical sales of approximately $750,000 in three months’ time. Approximately thirty thousand of Apple’s 43,000 employees work in Apple retail stores for about $25,000 a year, and according to most sources, they love their work. This kind of loyalty can verge on the patriotic.

You want your company’s services or products to be known as those of your company, rather than tagged to a specific creative employee. The more these ideas stay in the family, the more prosperous, and happy, everyone in the family becomes.

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